February 22, 2008
by Robert Fantina
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often afflicts individuals who have experienced an extremely traumatic event. People suffering from PTSD may be withdrawn, emotionally numb, or even become aggressive or violent. It is not unreasonable that it could also afflict a nation after some particularly violent experience. Like individuals, the collective psyche of the American public suffers greatly from extremely traumatic events. A look at two such events in the last fifty years, and conditions in the U.S. that followed, is informative.
On November 22, 1963, America's young president, John F. Kennedy, was riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The streets were lined with citizens anxious to get a glimpse of the president and his beautiful and fashionable wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. As the limousine and its entourage slowly wound through the city streets, several shots rang out and the pandemonium that ensued was replayed on television sets throughout America and the world. Within an hour it was announced that Mr. Kennedy was dead.
Throughout the next several days the world watched again and again the shaky amateur video of the seconds prior to and following the shots. U.S. citizens watched their elegant First Lady, covered with her husband's blood, as she first tried in panic to escape the speeding limousine and then later, standing in dignified grief, holding the hands of her two young children.
The alleged assassin was captured and then, on live television, was himself shot and killed by another man.
The hope of a generation, whether or not that hope was real or misplaced, had been extinguished. A much older, far less charismatic president was inaugurated, and the U.S.'s slow and painful descent into the Vietnam War was accelerated. Buddhist monks in that nation, feeling powerless against an enemy super-power, burned themselves to death in the streets in agonized protests. Young American men were drafted in alarming numbers, and U.S. college campuses saw increasing protests against the war, many of which turned deadly violent. Across the country the nation was polarized, as first President Lyndon B. Johnson, and then President Richard M. Nixon ignored the will of the citizenry and continually escalated and expanded the war, spied on protesters, infiltrated peace groups and ignored the carnage they wrought. Violence at home grew as frustrated citizens, terrified at a government out of control, sought to bring sanity back to it and found their peaceful methods met with government violence.
Eventually healing comes, but that seldom occurs without significant time and intervention. Following Mr. Kennedy's assassination, it was nearly fifteen years before the Vietnam War finally ended. During those years, tens of thousands of Americans died in that nation, along with millions of Vietnamese citizens. College campuses were sites of National Guardsmen shooting unarmed protestors. Polarization and demonization between 'hawks' and 'doves' was extreme.
Finally, after an involvement of nearly twenty-five years, the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, leaving that nation's citizens to settle their own affairs. Conscription was ended as the U.S. built an 'all-volunteer' military force. Students no longer needed fear being plucked from the classroom and sent halfway around the world to fight in a needless, immoral, imperial war. Some semblance of rationality, at least on the surface, returned to U.S. society.
Then came September 11, 2001. A U.S. president had been appointed by the Supreme Court less than a year earlier, following his defeat in the popular vote. As he stumbled his way along, granting favors to the rich and ignoring both the poor and the terrorist threat that the previous administration and his own intelligence had warned him about, four U.S. airliners were hijacked; two were crashed into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, one into the Pentagon and the fourth, headed for who knows where, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
Once again, people the world over saw the second plane hit the south tower, and watched repeated replays of the crash and the collapse of both buildings. The horror seen in the faces of those filmed as they watched cannot have been faked; no actor could portray such sincere dismay as shown by those witnesses.
Over the next several days, as U.S. citizens watched these horrors replayed repeatedly on their television and computer screens, and saw photos of those missing from the World Trade Center posted on billboards and street signs in New York, the same helplessness following Mr. Kennedy's assassination nearly forty years before was felt. Some unknown force had ascended from hell, it seemed, to once again scar a nation. Within days laws were being crafted to curtail the freedoms U.S. citizens enjoyed, while in the quiet and secret chambers of the president, plans to attack oil-rich Iraq were being discussed.
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When President Bush first began accusing Iraq of violent intentions toward the U.S., and naming that nation as somehow involved in the September 11 attacks, many Americans were skeptical. Most of America's trusted allies, not suffering from the aftermath of this violence, wisely choose not to follow Mr. Bush into his imperial disaster in Iraq. But once Congress was quickly either convinced of a threat from Iraq, or simply became willing to display their 'strong on terrorism' credentials by washing them in the blood of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens, the U.S. public lined up behind it and gave overwhelming support to the invasion of that sovereign nation. Mr. Bush was given carte blanche to invade, occupy and own a nation.
Mr. Bush justified his invasion of Iraq by capitalizing on the fears of U.S. citizens following September 11, 2001, and that war is soon to enter its sixth year. Arizona Senator John McCain, expected to be the Republican presidential candidate this year, has said that U.S. involvement in Iraq lasting one hundred years would be fine with him. Those who oppose the war and support an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. soldiers are branded traitors, willing to surrender to the 'enemy' and leave desperate Iraq to whatever evil forces wish to control it. Those within that nation who oppose the U.S. occupation are dismissed as 'insurgents,' worthy of nothing but U.S. bullets.
Following Mr. Kennedy's violent assassination, watched live on television around the country and seen repeatedly on the news for days afterwards, violence unleashed by the U.S. increased a hundredfold. After the September 11 attacks on the U.S., two wars were waged, both of which rage today with no end in sight for either of them. On September 11, nearly 3,000 Americans died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. People of compassion the world over mourn for them. But in the wars that the U.S. has waged, allegedly in response to the events of that day, millions have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where, one wonders, is the mourning for them within the U.S?
In those two victimized nations, now suffering under the imperial violence of the United States, families of U.S. victims mourn. And as in the U.S. following Mr. Kennedy's assassination or after the September 11 attacks, their mourning is coupled with anger, and the target of their anger is, naturally, the nation that has killed their loved ones. U.S. citizens were convinced by a conniving government that Afghanistan and Iraq were responsible for or at least involved in the events of September 11; they therefore supported the invasions of those nations. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan see U.S. soldiers, tanks, humvees and MRAPs patrolling their streets. They scream in terror as their doors are broken in at all hours of the day and night, and the men and boys in their families are dragged to undisclosed locations. They watch on television, when electricity is available, U.S. soldiers leading naked Iraqi prisoners around on leashes in infamous prisons.
Might not the people of Iraq be excused for experiencing PTSD? Might not their aggression against those who have perpetrated unspeakable violence against them be understood? Might they not also need time, time in which the violence can begin to fade in their memories rather than being repeated on a daily basis, in order to heal?
If indeed the U.S. has suffered from a kind of global PTSD, it unfortunately has the capacity to manifest its symptoms around the world to a degree not seen in the history of the planet. Iraqis are not so equipped, so they build roadside bombs to fight those committing violence against them, or strap explosives to their bodies and kill themselves and others in their rage.
The U.S. has embarked on yet another military misadventure that cannot have a happy ending, regardless of the spin Mr. Bush and his neocon yes-men may choose to put on it. Perhaps this current bloodbath will continue, as Mr. McCain has predicted, for one hundred years in one form or another. But regardless of its duration, it will leave in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi and Afghanistan people, not fond longings for freedom and democracy, but hatred toward those who have caused so much suffering for them. If Mr. Bush could only look past Iraq's oil, and the pipeline required by U.S. oil companies that must go through Afghanistan, perhaps, just perhaps, he could understand that blatant fact. But there is no chance of him doing so. It would require him to reject the wealthy corporations that have given him unprecedented power in the world today, in addition to requiring an admission of his own wrongdoing. This is not possible from a president who, during the 2004 debates, could not name a single mistake he had made during his first term in office.
No substantive change can be expected under a new administration, Republican or Democratic. Ownership of the White House seems to go to the highest bidder, like an exclusive eBay auction, and Senators McCain, Obama and Clinton do not appear willing to jeopardize that prize with statesmanship and leadership. And so the American tradition of rampant militarism and imperial wars will continue. Innocent people will die as the U.S. president, now and in the coming years, issues empty platitudes about 'freedom' and 'democracy,' all the while coveting the vast natural resources it steals from its victims. Oil will flow only at the monumental cost of oceans of innocent blood, and it seems that few in the U.S. government care about that cost.
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Robert Fantina [send him email] is a long-time activist for peace and social justice. He has worked with the Coalition for Peace Action in New Jersey. Following the 2004 presidential election, he moved to Canada, where he now resides. Robert is the author of Desertion and the American Solder: 1776-2006.
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